Interactive: Texas Health Care Lobbying

Ahead of the 83rd legislative session, the state’s 10 leading health care associations gave more than $4.6 million to Texas candidates. This interactive shows how much — and to whom — health care associations donated in 2011 and 2012.

House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, received more than any other single candidate from the state’s health care lobbies, nearly $360,000. Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, D-McAllen, was second with $233,250, more than $200,000 of which he received from the Border Health PAC, which advocates for medical professionals in South Texas.

More than 74 percent of the contributions went to Republican candidates, and more than 70 percent went to current elected officials.

View the total amounts health care associations donated to current elected officials or select an individual PAC from the drop-down menu. The lists of top recipients also include past candidates. For example, Steven Nguyen, an optometrist in North Texas who lost the Republican primary for House District 115, received the most money from the Texas Optometric Association, more than $105,000.

Texas Health Care Lobby Spending, 2011-12

To build this interactive, the Tribune scraped and cleaned information from our campaign finance database, searched for the state’s largest health care associations and summed the total contributions to find the ten health care associations that gave the most money in 2011 and 2012. There will be a slight margin of error, as misspellings in the original data may have caused us to miss some of the contributions. It also does not take into account other large donors from the health care industry, such as hospital systems or individual practitioners.

Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in our stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here.

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